A lesson in water preservation

I have heard of politicians announcing their intention to eliminate poverty, but an actor articulating a vision to eliminate state-wide drought? Iwould have caught my stomach and laughed at this recklessness, but for the person making this claim. Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao started the Paani Foundation (along with team members from the television show Satyamev Jayate) with this objective. I have sobered since; they couldn’t have selected a more relevant subject. By 2030, India’s per capita water availability is expected to decline from 1730 cubic metres to 1240 cubic metres; water balance could shrink almost half to 200-260 BCM (source: Strategic Foresight Group).

Interestingly, not all the blame can be laid at El Nino’s chaukhat; humankind has polluted lakes and rivers, over-pumped ground water without corresponding recharge, continued to grow water-intensive crops in watervulnerable areas.. The strident demand is to let the government do something about this; Paani Foundation suggests that citizen-led rain water harvesting or watershed management can turn the tide (lousy pun) faster.

This is what is remarkable about this year-old NGO. One, its sheer smallness contrasted with the grandness of its vision – idealistic you may call it, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? Two, each of the NGO’s promoters could have basked in their glory and issued a responsibility-abdicating statement that they were engaged in enhancing urban awareness for a water conservation problem affecting the rural millions; they selected to put their hands in the bucket instead. Three, they dared to take a contrasting stance from the Government of Maharashtra’s Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyaan that addressed village watershed management; the NGO advocated that the trick was not in addressing this problem outside-in but to inspire the rural folk to recognise the problem, find the land, money, know-how, hands and resource to harvest their own water.

Four, the NGO motivated-trainededucated a complete solution. For instance, the NGO invested in mass and digital media to educate through entertainment; it trained (technical and leadership) five persons per village, entailing coverage of 150,000 persons across 30,000 drought-vulnerable Maharashtra villages; it created a digital platform that comprised technical information on the one hand while accessing crowd-sourced funds, government support and volunteers on the other. The result is that the rural folk, who considered walking miles for water as part of their destiny, now, consider it important to measure rain in millimetres.

Five, the NGO did not just preach the message; it transformed the exercise into a game (first prize Rs 50 lakhs, second prize Rs 30 lakhs and third prize Rs 20 lakhs), starting with116 villages of three talukas - Koregaon (Satara district), Ambajogai (Beed district) and Warud (Amravati district). The four-day residential training camps comprised five villagers (including two women) per village; about 800 villagers were trained in watershed development. Six, the results have begun to show: in the Satyamev Jayate Water Cup competition, nearly 4,203 villagers completed Rs 91lacs of projects across a month-and-a-half in Ambajogai taluka.

The result is that when it rained last year, the water stayed where it fell, the first time such a thing had happened in years. Seven, a total 1368 crore litres of water storage was created, equivalent to 13,68,000 water tankers and around Rs 272 crore worth of annually saved water –without Paani Foundation funding any village (there is a term for this in management jargon: asset-light). The first prize went to Velu village in Koregaon taluka, which created the highest amount of water storage (231TCM). Eight, the immediate positives are remarkable.

Beed reported zero suicides during the course of the competition; senior government officials participated in manual labour; gram sabhas began to focus on sustainable development; the movement was catalysed by an unusual ally (women who had once railed against alcoholism); local inter-farm quarrels declined, crime graph dropped; village pride increased as the media wrote about them. From three talukas, Paani Foundation extends to 30 this year and a probable 358 in five years. When that happens, Maharashtra villages will be water-rich, cotton farmers will make more money, cotton harvests will be significant, yarn spinners will get abundant affordably-priced cotton, downstream fabric makers will be able to sell more and reinvest surpluses into new equipment and asset building. And all because an actor, his wife, and friend had this absolutely outlandish idea of making Maharashtra drought-free in five years.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's own. The opinions and facts expressed here do not reflect the views of Mirror and Mirror does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

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